Course:

Course Description

This course helps you enhance your multidisciplinary knowledge in the areas of build, infrastructure, release, and configuration management. We’ll start with overviews of both the Visual Studio family and Microsoft Azure as a foundation for the rest of the course before moving on to configuring the team project we’ll be using. We’ll configure teams to better manage work, and then clone a Git repository containing the primary application we’ll be building and releasing to the cloud.

The course then examines how you can reduce lead time using the Agile planning tools in Visual Studio, while still aligning with enterprise goals. These planning tools play an integral part in ensuring that we get meaningful traceability right through our DevOps pipeline.

We cover build environments, including cloud and hybrid options, and how to author build definitions for your applications. Quality is a critical consideration in your DevOps pipeline, so we’ll look at a number of features in Visual Studio 2017 designed to help you reduce technical debt and thereby help increase team productivity.

The remainder of the course looks into release and configuration management with a focus on deploying to Microsoft Azure. We’ll create release definitions, configure Continuous Deployment (CD) and learn how we can manage secrets using the Azure Key Vault. You’ll be introduced to Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and see how we can use ARM templates to better manage the creation of the Azure resources our application requires.

The final module in the course looks at Application Insights and how you can easily add monitoring to your applications. Learn how to reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and also mean time to repair (MTTR) using Application Insights.

This course includes hands-on labs to reinforce practical skills and ensure you’re ready to use the tools upon your return to the workplace.

Outline

Module 1: A Lap Around the Visual Studio 2017 Family

What’s new in Visual Studio 2017
Overview of the Visual Studio 2017 family
Overview of product features
A lap around Visual Studio Team Services

Module 2: A Lap Around Microsoft Azure

Overview of Microsoft Azure
Advantages of Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Azure App Service
Azure Virtual Machines

Module 3: Configuring Our Project in VSTS

Creating and configuring a new team project
Configuring teams in VSTS
Cloning a Git repository into your team project

Module 4: Agile Planning

Overview of Agile planning tools
Managing work using teams
Tracking progress using Kanban and task boards
Portfolio management

Module 5: Configuring a Modern Build Environment

Understanding build infrastructure
Using hosted build infrastructure
Configuring a hybrid environment with on-premises agents
Hosting private build infrastructure in Azure

Module 6: Automating Builds

Creating a build definition
Customizing your build using tasks
A closer look at build attributes
Triggering builds

Module 7: Maintaining Code Quality

The importance of maintaining code quality
Unit testing
Code coverage
Code Clone Analysis

Module 8: Creating Automated Release Pipelines

Overview of release management
Understanding artifacts
Creating a release definition
Understanding environments
Approval workflows and notifications

Module 9: A Closer Look at Build and Release Definitions

Configuring Continuous Deployment (CD)
Multi-machine deployment using deployment groups
Managing secrets in the Azure Key Vault

Module 10: Automating Functional and Performance Tests

Configuring infrastructure for test execution
Executing UI tests (Coded UI and Selenium tests)
Executing load and performance tests using Azure

Module 11: Using Azure Resource Manager

Overview of Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
Creating an ARM template
Using ARM in your release pipelines

Module 12: Monitoring Applications Using Application Insights

Overview of Application Insights (AI)
Adding AI to our applications
Alerts and availability
Diagnose failures and exceptions

Module 13: Creating Dashboards to Show Build and Release Status

Creating a Build and Release dashboard
Displaying build information on the dashboard
Displaying release information on the dashboard

Audience

DevOps-focused team members working with VSTS and Azure to build, release, and monitor applications.

Prerequisites

Attendees should be familiar with Visual Studio and have used Visual Studio Team Services.

What You Will Learn

At the completion of this course, attendees will be able to:

Describe the full feature set of Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle Management suite
Understand some of the key products within Microsoft Azure
Create and configure your team project
Create teams within your project to better manage work
Clone a Git repository
Use the Agile planning tools to maintain a prioritized flow of work to the team
Plan and configure different types of scalable build environments
Author build definitions for a variety of application types including ASP.NET and .NET Core
Configure Continuous Integration (CI) builds
Create custom build workflows using build steps
Use popular third-party extensions to improve your build workflow
Identify the problems caused by technical debt
Use some common features in Visual Studio to help reduce technical debt
Automate the execution of tests as part of our build
Understand the features and capabilities of Release Management
Create and manage release definitions
Create environments to handle your release requirements
Manage configuration information in each environment
Deploy software to Microsoft Azure
Configure Continuous Deployment (CD) by triggering releases from builds
Create approval workflows and track releases across environments
Understand Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and create ARM templates
Configure Application Insights to provide rich information about the availability, usage and performance of your application
Create information-rich dashboards to show build and release status

ALMDO17: DevOps Using Azure DevOps (Formerly VSTS)